


“cross my heart and hope to die.”

by clickingkeyboards



Series: one hundred ways to say 'i love you' [63]
Category: Murder Most Unladylike Series - Robin Stevens
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Best Friends, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Love, M/M, Unrequited Crush, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-02
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:55:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22439881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clickingkeyboards/pseuds/clickingkeyboards
Summary: Alexander made a new friend over the summer holidays, a Chinese girl called Hazel Wong. Despite having never met the girl, George would very much like her to blink out of existence, for her existence is phasing him out of his best friend's life and making his heart hurt in a way that is best friend is idiotic enough to not understand.Canon EraWritten for the sixty-third prompt in the '100 ways to say "I love you"' prompt list by p0ck3tf0x on Tumblr.
Relationships: (unrequited) Alexander Arcady/George Mukherjee, Alexander Arcady & George Mukherjee, Alexander Arcady/George Mukherjee, one-sided Alexander Arcady/George Mukherjee
Series: one hundred ways to say 'i love you' [63]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1533164
Kudos: 19





	“cross my heart and hope to die.”

**GEORGE**

Alexander has a new friend.

I wish that it was all I knew about her.

However, I cannot fucking escape her name, her person, her very words splayed out across paper in the burnt remanents of lemon juice ink.

“You’ve been replaced, Mukherjee!” Bob Featherstonehaugh cries out as Alexander rushes into the room. He barely casts a glance at me, throwing himself down at the foot of his bed and tearing open the envelope in his hand.

“I am  _ fully  _ aware,” I reply through gritted teeth as I turn the page on  _ Lord Edgware Dies _ . “How is Hazel doing?”

“She’s hopefully doing marvellous!” he says, burning the letter with his torch underneath the paper. A flush rises to his cheeks, creeping from his collar and up to his neck in blotches.

Once again, he will not catch my eye. He is staring instead at Hazel Wong, at the splayed words on the page in her curled handwriting that reminds me of my brother’s letters.

“A letter came for you, George,” Alexander says, finally meeting my eyes as he offers an envelope towards me.

For a moment, our eyes lock in a tandem of schoolboy excitement over something as simple as receiving a letter. Then it vanishes, Alexander hooked back on Hazel Wong.

_ To George, _

_ Cambridge is marvellous! I have never seen buildings so beautiful, nor walked amongst so many grand scholars. Every evening there’s meringues and champagne in somebody’s rooms, though I am partial to the parties thrown by Bertie Wells. In case you haven’t heard of him, he’s the son from the Fallingford Scandal but he’s a lot more than that. He’s marvellously intelligent, even though he doesn’t go to lectures. We have the same partiality to romantic literature, and we share our love of climbing. _

_ Climbing, George! I’m a night climber, just as I told you that I would be. I climb with Bertie Wells and a boy named Alfred Cheng, as well as a pair of rather nasty and spittingly racist twin brothers named Chummy and Donald. You know, the Shropshire Mellings? They’re both insufferable pricks, and Alfred is boastful and broad-shouldered with an upturned and snooty demeanour, but Bertie Wells makes it more than bearable.  _

_ I hope you’re enjoying Fourth Year, and I’m sorry that I’m not there to protect you from dickheads. I hope your detective boy is alright, give Alexander my regards. _

_ H. _

Alexander is grinning after his letter too. I think that I should like to slit the throat of somebody (strong words, I know, and Harold would tell me to stop being untruthful) just to stop my shaking hands.

Why don’t people ever  _ see _ ?

* * *

**ALEXANDER**

“Do you think that I should ask after Daisy, George?” Everybody else has filtered out of the dormitory and to the common room for a game of cards, leaving George and me alone, the only people to be seen on our floors of the house.”

“Why not?” he asks from where he’s sprawled on his bed, head bent over his copy of  _ Lord Edgware Dies _ . 

“I don’t know. I mean, I like Hazel a lot so will she think that I don’t care about her if I ask after—”

“Shut up.”

“Excuse me?”

“Just shut up, Alex.”

I turn around with my lemon juice pen in my hand, taking my pen off the paper halfway through the letter. The instant I do, I know that I won’t be able to find where I left off, and I know that I’ll have to start again.

Hazel will have to wait. 

“What?”

“I said, shut up! Hastings, just shut up! Why can’t you see? Are you so blind as to not be able to see that I’m fucking upset?”

“Why?”

“It doesn’t—“

“No, George, don’t be like that!” I get to my feet, turning to face where he has sat up and is staring at me, uniform immaculate but eyes wide.

“I said that it doesn’t matter.” He swings his legs off the bed and stands up, taking a couple of steps towards me.”

“It matters to me.”

“It won’t matter to you in a moment, Alex.”

“Why?”

“Just let it go.”

“I won’t! Of course I won’t let it go, you’re my best friend.”

“I won’t be your best friend in a moment if you don’t shut up and stop talking this instant.”

“George! For crying out loud, what did you do? I would only stop being your friend if you murdered someone.”

“It’s far worse than that.”

“What is it?”

“I can’t tell you!”

“Why?”

The two of us are standing almost chest-to-chest, George breathing hard with tears tracking down his cheeks, my own body flushed red and my hands shaking at my sides.

“BECAUSE I’M IN LOVE WITH YOU.”

I cannot help but step back, regarding him in a new light. “George—“

“No, Hastings, shut up.” His hands flit in the air as he gathers his words, eventually drifting to his face to push the tears away with the backs of his hands. “I... look, alright?” I’ve never heard him stutter. “It’s unfair. On both of us, if I don't tell you. This has been eating me up since we were... since we were twelve, Alex, and I could bear it. Kid myself. Swallow it down. But all I’ve been hearing about since Summer is fucking Hazel Wong and I’m getting a bit sick of it!”

His voice is high, hysterical as it rides on gasping breaths. The words are obviously hard to force out and I can understand why. It casts a stinging burn onto my skin, makes my head spin with violent dizziness, throws a dark cover over our friendship as I reanalyse each moment, searching for signs, hints, things that should have forced me to notice.

“I don’t—”  _ I don’t love you in the way that you love me. _

_ But I do love you. _

“I know.” His hands sunk deep into the pockets of his blazer, George leans into me and practically hisses, “It hurts, you know. Even if I wasn’t violently in love with you, it still hurts when your best friend in all the world is suddenly more interested in a fucking girl that he’s known for half of a damn year.”

“No, George!” I yell, lunging at him as he walks out of the room and grabbing onto the padded shoulder of his blazer. My heart lurches with me movement, as tears prick at the corners of my eyes. “George, please, it isn’t—”

The realisation seizes my body all at once: I don’t damn care. Even though it’s astonishing, provoking a vivid, visceral, physical reaction from me, I don’t care. My best friend is in love with me, wants to kiss me, has thought about doing Lord knows what else with me, and the strangest thing is that I don’t care. He is still the best friend I have ever had, the most resilient person I have ever known, the one who ranks second in my life and is beside me on everything I do.

Even if George wants me in ways that I will never be able to have him, we still need each other in ways that can be reciprocated.

I will not damn lose my best friend to a feeling as trivial as love.

“George,” I say again, actually tugging at his blazer. “George, I—”

He turns and raises a hand, in the manner that usually begins our complex handshake. Before I can even raise my own to join it to his, he draws it back and brings it across my cheek. There is a sharp crack and the sting aches across my cheek, blood rushing to the point of contact and flushing my face rapidly red where all the colour previously drained from it. The sudden change makes my head swim.

“Don’t mourn something before you’ve lost it, Alex,” he hisses, and I am once again grateful and frustrated that I am the only person earth privy to his violent mood swings, “but don’t begin to care about me again just because you’ve realised that you can lose me.”

He stalks from our dormitory and down the stairs to the common room, no doubt to wipe away his tears and slip into the gambling ring that he accidentally started when we were in First Year.

I realise that I’ll mind if he gambles all his money away to the older boys.

I will mind but he won’t.

* * *

George ends up sulking back to the dorm, announcing to a dormitory that he thinks is empty, “I lost! I fucking  _ lost _ !”

There is a sharp thump, and my brain supplies the words  _ George’s shoe against a bedframe _ .

Then he rounds the corner to where our beds are tucked away, and sees me sat at the desk in the corner, leant over my newest letter to Hazel.

_ Your Games teacher sounds unkind! It almost makes your old teacher that you told me about appear bearable. Our history teacher is as bad as that, punishing George painfully for his intelligence with his metrestick across George’s back. _

_ George just told me _

_ Something else that’s going on is _

_ I think that George’s brother has joined a secret club with your brother, the climbing one at Cambridge! _

_ How is Daisy? _

_ Write back soon, _

_ Alexander _

“Oh. Alex.”

“George,” I say in my usual jovial tones. “One moment, I don’t want to lose my place.”

I sign off my name and pretend not to hear my best friend’s feet against the ground as he walks across the room. “What are you writing to her?” he asks, his hands settling on the back of the chair as he looks over my shoulder, watching as the ink fades into the paper the moment after it leaves my pen.

“I— oh,  _ George _ .” I shoot to my feet and turn around, crushing George in my arms in the tightest hug. “ _ George _ , I… I don’t  _ care _ .”

His hands dangle awkwardly at his sides but I keep hugging him as tight as I can. “You— you don’t?”

“I don’t.”

He wraps his arms back around me and I sigh in relief, my entire body relaxing against him. “I’m sorry.”

My head ducks into his hair, the dark strands tickling my brow and my tears of relief and sadness dripping from my face and into his hair. His arms are sure and tight around my back, fists knotted into the back of my shirt, and his collar is tough and non-pliable under where my thumb and forefinger worry along it.

Thank  _ god _ .

“Don’t be.”


End file.
